from Voices in Wartime

It should break your heart to kill

It is a condition of wisdom in the archer to be patient because when the arrow leaves the bow, it returns no more. ― ancient Arabic proverb.

It should break your heart to kill.
It should make you shake and sweat,
nightmare you, strand you out in a desert
of irrevocable desolation, the consequences
seared into the vein, no matter what adrenaline
feeds the muscle its courage, no matter
what god shines down on you, no matter
what crackling pain and anger
you carry in your fists, my friend,
it should break your heart to kill.
It should never be so easy as this.

― Brian Turner (returned Iraq war veteran and poet, featured in the Voices in Wartime Anthology)

From A Boy On A Dreambed

The Summer 2005 issue of Poetry Bay is up and I'm pleased to report that my poem, From A Boy On A Dreambed, is included.

Happy Writing,

Esther

Un-hiding the hidden

Thank you all for your responses to my psychoanalytic diaries. Making the decision to place them on-line was not an easy one, as you can well imagine. I had planned a manuscript summing up each year, including the month with the Vacation Analyst (that first year) and the six months with the Clean-up Analyst, as I call him, in the last year. But a summation manuscript is not the same thing as a diary; and since that’s the writing form I used during the analysis, for me it is the most authentic. Now the problem is time, of course.

There are thousands of entries, handwritten and typed. Some are on old DOS! disks, and I must pick and choose what to transcribe. But time’s moving and I knew I needed to get this done before old(er) age takes over - and especially since my husband is frail and I wanted to see us there in those old pages; so this summer I took the project on.

Whatever gets done will be it - though I'll work past summer; the rest I’ll donate to the university archives and hope other analysands will do the same with their analytic notes. One can stipulate “not to be opened for 50 years” if necessary and they can always be sanitized (names and places inked out).

Thanks again for your much appreciated support. It's good to un-hide what's been hidden, to get it out from underneath the desk or off an old floppy or out of the file cabinet. You've helped make my job easier. L'Chaim, to life! Esther

Reflections on Poetry Therapy

A number of people have asked me how I feel about Poetry Therapy and use of the word therapist, especially when employed by teachers and writers who are unlicensed as therapists. In this regard, I share with you an article I sent to the National Association of Poetry Therapy upon my return from its Spring conference:


Reflections on Poetry Therapy: After the St. Louis Conference
May 4 – 8, 2005

by

Esther Altshul Helfgott, Ph.D., History
University of Washington

My experience at the poetry conference was mixed; on the one hand, I made friends and attended workshops that I could not have encountered elsewhere. Perie Longo and Phyllis Klein’s Poetic Conversation was stunning for its creation of intimacy in a large setting. Sherry Reiter’s and Barbara’s Bethea’s expertise in building community and hope through poetic conscience was stellar; and, for the second year in a row, Geri Chavis’ experiential peer group led me to insights I would be hard-pressed to find outside the Poetry Therapy community. As a teacher, writer and healing arts facilitator, however, I am, after this conference, in even stronger disagreement with NAPT’s training philosophy than I was before I attended.

From the beginning of my two-year association with NAPT (National Association of Poetry Therapy), I have been troubled by its use of the word therapist in the context of the CPT (certified poetry therapist). The only differentiation between the two tracks is defined by hours, 975 for the RPT (registered poetry therapist), a licensed clinician, and 440 for the CPT, one who enters into the program via the Humanities—as an educator or writer, without a clinician’s background or degree. One wonders, then, why NAPT is using the word therapist to define its healing arts trainees.

Therapy is not just a word, as a CPT mentioned to me during the conference. It holds weights and measures. As our keynote poet, Greg Orr, wrote in his memoir Blessing, “Words have the power to reveal what is hidden.” (p.4) We all know this, whether clinician or non-clinician. So I ask: What is hidden in NAPT that prevents the development of a training track that would allow educators, poets or writing group facilitators, who have no intention of becoming licensed therapists, access to training without the weight of the word therapist around their necks?

A personal development group is not a therapy group, whether modified by Kleinian, poetry or dance. Just because healing occurs in a group or individual does not mean the healing is defined by therapy, though it may indeed be therapeutic.

It is my feeling that NAPT is a young organization and has not yet found itself. It is not in touch with its theoretical or philosophical underpinnings, its inherent belief systems, to the extent that it should be inviting writers and educators to train without really knowing what to do with them.

The word therapy is not being used carefully, not with full respect for its inherent meanings, its context and aliveness. As such, I am suspending my training towards certification. If NAPT were to develop a program for developmental group facilitators, I would participate with a sense of honor. At this point, when I feel strongly that it is unethical for an organization to certify trainees to become unlicensed therapists, I can not.

I would have liked to have had the opportunity to discuss some of these issues formally during the conference, instead of tuning into conversations in hallways, coffee shops and airports. Unfortunately, the conference setting did not provide space for trainee concerns. I would hope that next year more processing and discussion space will be made for all activities. Namaste.


Esther Altshul Helfgott writes on psychoanalysis, is a writing coach, and facilitates writing groups for women at Cancer Lifeline, Seattle, WA.

make a place for youself

We'll be discussing and writing from the following poem in the Cancer Lifeline groups next week:

How To Be a Poet by Wendell Berry
to remind myself)

Make a place to sit down.
Sit down. Be quiet.
You must depend upon
affection, reading, knowledge,
skill—more of each
than you have—inspiration,
work, growing older, patience,
for patience joins time
to eternity. Any readers
who like your work,
doubt their judgment.

Breathe with unconditional breath
the unconditioned air.
Shun electric wire.
Communicate slowly. Live
a three-dimensioned life;
stay away from screens.
Stay away from anything
that obscures the place it is in.
There are no unsacred places;
There are only sacred places
And desecrated places.

- Wendell Berry

How To Be a Poet by Wendell Berry from Given New Poems, © Shoemaker, Hoard, Washington, D.C. Reprinted FROM WRITER'S ALMANAC

Scotty

Here by Grace Paley

In today's first meeting of the Monday writing group, I used Grace Paley's Here as a trigger for writing and discussion:

Here by Grace Paley

Here I am in the garden laughing
an old woman with heavy breasts
and a nicely mapped face

how did this happen
well that's who I wanted to be

at last a woman
in the old style sitting
stout thighs apart under
a big skirt grandchild sliding
on off my lap a pleasant
summer perspiration

that's my old man across the yard
he's talking to the meter reader
he's telling him the world's sad story
how electricity is oil or uranium
and so forth I tell my grandson
run over to your grandpa ask him
to sit beside me for a minute I
am suddenly exhausted by my desire
to kiss his sweet explaining lips.

copyrightGrace Paley

Calliope

~Calliope~
Your muse is Calliope, the Fair Voiced, Chief muse
and the muse of Epic Poetry. Her symbol is the
writing tablet. I wonder if you'll end up as
the next Tolkein...?

I think I'll end up as me...

Which of the Nine Muses is your muse?
brought to you by Quizilla

Abe

sons

me and the boys

Daughter's foot

Butchy and Bernard

Scott & Abe - July 8, 2005 - home for vacation

Me and Abe, 1989

Choices by Gallagher

In today's first meeting of the Thurs writing group at Cancer Lifeline, I used Tess Gallagher's Choices as a trigger for writing and discussion:

Choices by Tess Gallagher

I go to the mountain side
of the house to cut saplings,
and clear a view to snow
on the mountain. But when I look up,
saw in hand, a nest is clutched in
the uppermost branches.
I don't cut that one.
I don't cut the others either.
Suddenly, in every tree,
an unseen nest
where a mountain
would be.

© Tess Gallagher

Writing as Mother

Why did I return to the diaries at just this time – when I haven’t revisited myself in that place of other since I wrote them? The Friday before I made the decision to publish the diaries on-line, Abe had gone to the doctor. The prognosis was not good and I was living each minute as if I could lose him this second, now. I didn’t realize at the time how frantic I was, but did the only thing I know to do during periods of chaos and stress – put myself inside a page.

This time I did not write, not frantically anyway. I went to the year the analysis began, 1990. I wanted to find me and Abe there, and though we were married nine years prior, I went to the analytic diary to remember who we were in relation to that period, to see what I could see of us, who we have been throughout our twenty-four years together; what I’m finding is good because it helps me understand how we’ve lived our lives together, why and how we made it through, or didn’t, and then did again.

I had been blocking something else too: I started the analysis, after eleven years of psychoanalytic therapy with the same man I was to do the analysis with, the month after my son was hit by a car. That was more than I could tolerate. He was in Harborview for two weeks and at home for another two weeks, then back to school on crutches for the next six months. But I remained on crutches and, if not for the writing, would be there still; for it is the writing that helps me care for others, and it is the writing that nurtures and cares for me.

-Esther Altshul Helfgott

The Diary Form

I am finally getting the psychoanalytic diaries together and publishing them in diary form. I have always envisioned presenting Psychoanalysis: The Magic and The Lie as a diary, a representation of the self over time. But my decision has been years in the making, back and forth from non-fiction to fiction (no matter I disown myself within the mindset of fiction and have never been comfortable there, except as Reader) to non-fiction, essay and poem, to fiction and back again, gratefully, to non-fiction in diary form.

I have been afraid of putting the whole truth on the page, to have it out there in plain sight, all the while it is only the truth I mean to tell, but always, and to tell it primarily to myself. I resisted publishing primary source material. How much easier to escape into secondary source, to turn the self into one. I neglected the diaries when, from the beginning, I knew the story of my analytic relationship needed to be published in the mode I had written it in, while I was experiencing it.

Finding my inoculation certificate and writing about Dr. Whittle the other day helped me understand once again how important fragmentary writing is to showing the writer’s work on the move, of discovering a piece of paper and remembering through its touch and absence of sound, how frantic and loud the past.

A half dozen pages or so of my fragments will appear soon in Olivia Dresher’s anthology, In Pieces: An Anthology of Fragmentary Writing, Impassio Press (2006). In these pages I write about my mother’s death, easier to hang out in the air, I suppose, than the dirt in the analytic relationship, which held her and all the rest.

-Esther Altshul Helfgott

Dr. Whittle

Dr. Henry Lyman Whittle of 1229 N. Calvert St. signed the certificate below. He was our pediatrician even after we moved up from East Baltimore. I never saw such a doctor. When Dot and I were sick he'd sit by our beds and draw us Disney characters - Mickey and Minnie riding bikes, Donald and Goofy on skates. He told Mother she didn't have to go to all the trouble of making a pot of chicken soup; a can of Campbell's was just as good, together with warm tea, toast and apple sauce. We could also have an Orangeade: half a glass orange juice, another half water and a ton of sugar stirred in. After he gifted us with his spectacular drawings (he could have worked for Disney), he'd sit at the kitchen table, sip a cup of tea with out parents and politely answer Daddy's questions about our brother becoming a doctor, all part of the $2.00 house call. It seemed every visit was the same, even when we had to charge it.



I wonder why, if I got the shot in 1942, did it take until 1944 to issue the certificate.